"Preface" [2013] ELECD 1263; in Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin (eds), "Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) vii

Book Title: Human Rights

Editor(s): Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781002742

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 4

Extract:

Preface
This book began with the reflection that theories of human rights, or of
rights more generally, as we have taught them and been taught them for
years, labour under the weight of various dichotomies. These theories
have developed various polar oppositions that were meant to bring
clarity, but have more often brought confusion. In fact, these various
dichotomies have been typically honoured by rejection rather than by
their strict observance.
All students and teachers of human rights know many such distinctions,
and several of our early discussions about this volume were addressed to
reducing the list to the most meaningful or the most pervasive of them.
These included:

1. Legal rights and moral rights. It is sometimes thought that moral
rights are merely expressions of a vague wish that a particular claim
should be legally enforceable (that they are, to use Dworkin's term,
only `background' rights1), while `real' rights are legal, in the sense
that they give individuals strong and effectively enforceable institu-
tional claims against their state or against some other states or
against other individuals.
2. Negative rights and positive rights. This is a distinction that has been
a preferred target of attack by more ambitious theorists of rights. In
its canonical formulation, the distinction is meant to be between
those rights that can be respected simply by non-interference with a
person's sphere of autonomy and those rights that require, for their
fulfilment, a `positive' action, such as spending material resources, to
implement them.
...